I'll go first: r/kitty. One of the hundred grillion cat subs back on Reddit, the culture in this one was you posted a cat picture, and the only word allowed in the title or in any comments or replies was "Kitty."
Someone is using that subreddit for covert communications, I just know it. Either on the level of "if u/PM_me_your_nostrils posts an orange cat, we attack at dawn!" or there's some steganography going on with the pictures, but that subreddit was too stupid to be as active as it was.
My city has a local company that rents storage units and they have entirely too many locations relative to the population of our city such that I believe they’re a criminal enterprise. I believe they construct so many new buildings for money laundering purposes and to facilitate human trafficking and drug running out of them.
Breaking news, I just googled them and one of the owners was convicted in his 20s of trying to sell poached falcons to Saudi Arabian royalty. The plot thickens.
Elon Musk is not an idiot. He was hired by other rich people like the Saudis to destroy Twitter, to prevent further incidents of public protest organization like what happened in Egypt and the Occupy movement. The degradation of the platform is intentional, and the amplification of right-wing voices helps to chase left-leaning social activists off of the platform. There is no equivalent platform for in-the-moment organization of protests.
Some US states that keep enacting highly unpopular anti-trans, anti-woke, sexist, racist legislation are doing it in an effort to get left-aligned people to move away and not consider going there, with the goal of skewing elections in their favor.
I think that people being in overly light polluted areas for their entire lives is or at least is a major part of what's wrong with society these days.
When you go out at night and look at a sky completely filled with stars it makes you feel a certain way. Full of wonder, small, curious. Conversations always go in the "what if" or "what do you think about" sort of direction. It really puts you in your place in a strangely calm, thoughtful , and healthy way. And the more you can see, the better. If the Milky Way is visible it just puts you in awe.
People don't get to experience that very often, if at all, when they live in a populated area.
I think that is by design.
If you cannot just go outside and get that huge feeling of idk existential wonder, you're going to get hard coded into your personal fears and beliefs and all that whatnot. This drives the population apart. Meanwhile, all forms of light pollution measures are either deemed too expensive or just not enforced. At least in my area. And large amounts of the population live somewhat close to an airport. Never really gets dark at night near an airport...
Anyways that's my ted talk about how light bulbs are ripping society apart by its very fibers. Next up is how ceilings are a conspiracy to keep the poors underfoot if anyone wants to hear it.
Also related to reddit, since that's where I was always inundated with this shit, before moving here: the constant stream of Genshin Impact leaks that come out, that the whole obnoxious subculture is built around, are just released by Mihoyo, intentionally, under the guise of all the anonymous leakers that constantly come and go. Seems to me like the only explanation for how CONSTANTLY leaks come out, and how they're basically never actually damaging to the game or the company, while being REALLY effective at stirring up obsession in the fanbase, and driving people to invest more time and money into the game to be prepped to get the next new character immediately on release.
Also how so many of the leakers would release extremely accurate stats and numbers, but then drop statements like "if I release any more than this, I'd be risking my safety" or "since everyone's been asking about it, I'll go ahead and confirm X, but after this I'm gonna have to go on hiatus for a while, until things cool down". Seems like nonsense meant to either inflate the leaker's ego, or rile up the fanbase.
The US senators: mitch mcconnell, ted cruz, and lindsey graham used fraud to win their respective seats in 2020. All three were in tight races according to the polls but all three won with bigger margins than was to be expected.
This idea came from a few articles that were discussing this issue a few days after the election, then those articles all just disappeared.
Maybe the articles disappeared because there was no fraud
Insurance companies randomly deny claims just to see if you’ll fight it. If you don’t, they’ll know they can deny more if your claims in the future. This is illegal, but if it’s a “bug” in the software or “AI” than they get away with it. Actually it’s harder with AI since people are more skeptical and have already caught them doing it. However this may be due to the AI being trained on the intentionally buggy software.
Paper straws were pushed by big corporate polluters to build a negative association with environmentalism.
Plastic straws are single-use plastics, but seem unexceptional by those standards. It's almost a meme that they're being singled out like they're the single greatest source of plastic waste, or uniquely damaging to ocean life.
On top of that, there are way better ways of reducing straw usage. I've used bioplastics that seemed way better. You could redesign the lids. You can do the plastic bag thing and charge people a nickel for a straw or whatever. Hell, you could just not give straws with every drink, and plenty of people will just drink from their cups and glasses. Instead, we get paper straws, something that is so obviously a bad idea it sounds like a joke, or a metaphor for a useless invention. Often served with cups and lids made entirely out of plastic.
So you get a bunch of people who have their drinks kind of ruined by a frustrating straw. It's a small thing, but it's just a little nudge away from environmentalism. You build an association with disappointment and inconvenience. Maybe it doesn't cause a big sway, but it makes people maybe a little more anti-environmentalist than they already were, or just less passionate about environmentalism.
Personal reddit conspiracy theory as to why image hosting is on site:
r/fatpeoplehate exists, does its thing (hating fat people)
They get some images removed from imgur, the image host du juor of reddit at the time.
They go on the offensive and start harassing fat imgur workers.
The subreddit gets banned.
Under a year later, reddit puts in image uploading.
My theory is that 3 resulted in imgur hitting up reddit and threatening to block the site if they didn't reign in fatpeoplehate. Reddit did, by 4, because the alternative was no images and that would absolutely fuck reddit up. This in turn leads to 5 to prevent that powerplay again.
JD Vance was forced in as the Trump VP pick by the Heritage Foundation so that when Trump either dies or stops cooperating with them on Project 2025, they already have a man in place to take over. And that's likely the reason for the assassination attempts.
If Trump dies, they get Vance (a true believer...unlike Trump who just wants the power to stay out of prison) at the top of the ticket.
There's a user here, who was '101' at reddthat, then piefed, then feddit.org, and was 911 at lemmynsfw, and is currently 911 at programming.dev, who posts a bunch of articles over a week or so, then deletes their account and moves on to another instance. They're up to something, surely. (the only real downside to this behaviour - that I can think of - is that new instances won't be able to get their posts, because Lemmy doesn't return posts for deleted users)
That Absolute, see also here, is something nefarious, possibly used for industrial espionage. My company is a client and using one of its IP addresses, I could see documentation that was quite concerning. In the background, it checks all of your files for anything that looks like a password, a social security number or a credit card number, then uploads these files to some server to protect them... What's really weird is that I cannot access the same information from an outside IP address, but here's a review, corroborating parts of it. Make of it what you will!
I don't think this is too far out there but I haven't seen it around much. Epstein was a honeypot.
He got an absolutely disgusting sweetheart deal for his initial conviction resulting in him being released for 12 hours a day for work and a 13 month sentence. Now the attorney that cut that deal (illegally, mind you) was Alex Acosta. He was nominated for secretary of labor in 2017 and faced scrutiny for that deal, to which he said he was told epstein "belonged to intelligence" and to "leave it alone."
Supporting circumstamtial evidence includes ghislaine maxwells father having known connections to MI6, mossad, and the KGB, though he died in 1991 so that doesn't necessarily imply much. Additionally, the FBI has HARD FUCKING EVIDENCE including tapes which doubt less contain CSAM, yet nobody has actually been arrested as a result.
The issue is that this relies on taking Acosta at his word, and he's kind of a huge piece of shit. It could be possible that he was buddies with epstein and gave him a deal and covered up the evidence because he was involved too, and presumably enough powerful people in government were involved to keep everything quiet.
Sounds crazy when spelled out, but it's hard to imagine why else nothing would come of the mountains of evidence that probably followed the raids, or why epstein wasn't closely watched after his initial conviction.
The Jan 6th temper tantrum was instigated as a response to the BLM and other Covid-era protests. The owner class was getting nervous about the working class protesting about things that matter, so they riled up some of their disposable morons to storm the Capital as a way to discredit direct action. And we're already seeing the effects; whether it's a labor strike or a student sit-in, we're told by centrists to "protest peacefully" and not inconvenience anyone, aka don't protest.
The addition of microphones and cameras to things like phones, computers, watches and other technology is to normalize being surveiled as well as minimize other privacy violations. We now have fridges that have WiFi capabilities now and often in the presence of some sort of device with a camera due to phones.
That Target's entry into the Canadian market was designed to fail from the start so that Walmart could swoop in, take over the entire logistics chain and ensure people get to keep their jobs to quell the concerns about Walmart becoming a monopoly in Canada.
Target failed so spectacularly that from my perspective on the inside it had to be by design. When the stores first ooened there was no stock available because we were shipping goods on trailers with no skids, packed floor to ceiling at random then expecting some poor souls in the back rooms of Target stores everywhere (likely with no previous logistics experience) to unload, organize the product into categories on skids and then take them out to the aisles to be put on shelves. We should have been building skids in the warehouses for months until demand settled and could be fulfilled by maximizing trailer efficiency with floor to ceiling loads.
There were an unbelievable amount of blatant inefficiencies and Inventory Control was deliberately understaffed so we ended up with a warehouse with thousands of open rack slots but the system thought the warehouse was full. Multiple layers of this kind of shit were going on and every time we voiced concern about it, management told us to just keep our heads down.
I swear some execs with nice golden parachutes conspired to ensure Target failed so Walmart could swoop in and save the day, breaking through the public concern about monopolization.
tl;dr - accepted history is that Charles Babbage designed a series of mechanical computers in the mid 1800s, and the underlying theory behind them would go on to influence work a century later when the technology had caught up to the idea, but they were never built. There are a bunch of coincidences and unexplained meetings that suggest that maybe he sold his plans to Italy who then built one of his designs in secret. This is also supported by modern attempts to build a computer from his plans - there was 1 measurement wrong across tens of thousands of parts, and it worked perfectly. Babbage was a skilled engineer but to get all that correct, on the first go, entirely from theory is maybe a bit much
Cats are aliens from another planet. A much warmer planet with less gravity!
Nothing else explains why a cat will lay in the sun on a very hot day like it’s nothing at all.
They also radiate the heat of a small pizza oven.
They act like we’re their servants in very un-animal-like ways.
They push things off of places all the time, like they’re expecting them to float not fall.
They’ll be completely normal, then take off running like their tail’s on fire, just to relish in the high gravity that allows them to jump and land a very short distance away.
The fashion world is in a war on pockets, so they can sell more handbags. The fewer and smaller pockets we have, the more accessories we need to buy. First they came for women's pockets. Now they're trying to make cargo shorts unacceptable for the same reason.
They build our houses specifically to be inefficient at staying cool, then they sell us AC units and power to cool down our inefficient houses. They must be stopped.
Washing machines double as portals to another dimension which is populated by sock loving aliens who want to save the cost of manufacturing their own socks. When socks go missing in the washing machine, the aliens end up getting free and clean ones. The next time you see someone who claims to make washing machines, check if they have an otherworldly affinity for socks.
Alex Jones was a CIA plant, to make conspiracy theorists look crazy… And it worked really really well.
The government was nervous because there were some conspiracy theories that were a little too close to reality. Shit like MK ULTRA and the Harvard mind control experiment sound fake, but we have the declassified docs. We know they happened. And there were lots of conspiracy theories that were likely hitting just a little too close for comfort. But outright disputing the conspiracy theories would just add credibility to them, in a “methinks the lady doth protest too much” sort of way.
So instead, they set out to discredit the people making the claims. They wanted to poison the well. So they found a dude named Alex Jones who had potential. He’s easily manipulated, so they can basically feed him wild conspiracies and he’ll eat them up. And all they had to do was boost his message. Jones never even needed to knew he was a plant, (and in fact, it would work better if he remained clueless.)
They gave conspiracy theorists a face. Before Alex Jones, conspiracy theories were something the average person jokingly threw around while drunk at the bar. But suddenly, conspiracy theorists were up front and center. And here’s the important part: the theories didn’t have a good spokesman. Suddenly, the average person’s view of conspiracy theories shifted. They weren’t funny anymore; They had your crazy uncle ranting about dead kids being fake.
By giving conspiracy theories a face, then having that face spew the most insane bullshit alongside the true (or nearly true) theories, the government was able to discredit the true theories. They were able to poison the well, because the main person ranting about the conspiracy also thinks Sandy Hook was a hoax.
Conspiracy Theorist culture has been coopted by the evangelical right in the wake of shit like Watergate and Iran-Contra making a non-interfered-with conspiracy theorist culture seem too dangerous to the right to be allowed to persist.
Evidence being that if you go far enough down the rabbit holes of the looney theories we all like to make fun of, you'll inevitably find some evangelical nut preaching about how it has to be that way either because they believe it says so in the bible or because they believe it's a sign of the rapture which is surely happening within their lifetime, or often both.
It's like the most dangerous kind of conservative appropriation of counterculture narrative.
facts: a couple of weeks ago the commander rules committee, the independent group that governs the popular Commander format, started receiving death threats after they banned some boring ass broken cards (jeweled lotus? dockside extortionist? nobody is ride or die for those)
as a result, the rules committee turned over control of the format to Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro, the makers of magic the gathering
fact: last year after some magic the gathering content was leaked, Hasbro send literal pinkertons to harasss the youtuber leaking it and recover the leaked goods
conspiracy theory: hasbro hired the pinkertons to make those death threats against the rules committee so that hasbro could seize control ove the most popular independent format of magic
In 2016, there were a bunch of creepy/killer clown sightings. At least in America it made the news pretty regularly. My conspiracy theory is that it started purely as Guerilla Marketing for the 2017 IT adaptation.
Scientology isn’t a religion or a cult-like one - at least not for the top tier.
It’s a doomsday cult disguised as a religion to be a tax dodge. Scientology has Gold Base and Trementina base among others, all bunkers. The famous people get money, tax free, donated to their “church”, and is used to fund doomsday bunkers.
Political extremism isn't real (specifically in regards to left wing "extremism"). Its a social construct created by the capitalist class to convince workers that left wing ideologies are scary and having your elections be between two liberals is "normal". If you ignore that ideologies like Anarchism become common sense. Why do we need lords and masters, why do we need the tyranny of capitalists and the cruel rule of "democratically elected" leaders? Ultimately we do not, the economy would be better if it was owned by the workers and world better if every person was free to be the master of their own life. Capitalists and politicans fully understand this, thats why they pump everyone with propaganda so they can keep their positions of privilege and power.
All these Verizon outages are intentional and part of the plan to invalidate the 2024 election.
We'll see it happen again on and around election day, maybe xitter will go down too.
Whole voting districts in Georgia won't report in, citing system crashes, security breaches, whatever they feel like making up. Republican Secretaries of State will declare the election compromised before vote counting even starts.
Obviously there's also a hurricane and massive flooding, hence the tinfoil hat, but let's not forget where and when we are in history, and that The Business Plot was a real thing.
Years ago I had fun with "what if the US never actually went to the moon". I did not believe it, it was just a nice plot idea, we even made a pen & paper oneshot about it. Nowadays I have no whatsoever fun in thought experiments like this, because the real threat of someone believing it to be true. I want to enjoy "birds aren't real" or "giraffes do not exist" or ... the worst is flat earth. It started out as a joke and now idiots try to proof the earth is flat, proof by accident it isn't and then question rather their methods than their belief system. We just can't have nice things.
The highest quality fruits, veggies, and meats go to restaurants leaving only mid stuff at the grocery store. Which makes cooking at home seem inferior to restaurant food even for home chefs. Pushing people to spend more going out and drive capitalism
I got another one (that's pretty much a fact) in order to get facial recognision, fingerprint sensors, etc working you have to login with your ms/apple/google acc, on windows 7 you didn't have to... now why would you need an online connection to setup a piece of physikal hardware with local sofyware??? It's pretty simple: apple, google and microsoft know your face, your fingerprint, your voice, your location, etc
The Bin Laden killing was a hoax. That guy died year ago because he was on dialysis machines that wouldn’t really function well somewhere deep in the Pakistani mountains. Or maybe he was actually in that house they raided at some point. But the message came out of nowhere like around the time of the reelection campaign. And they never showed a body. But then they even came up with some BS excuse that a sea burial would be Islamic tradition. Also if they really found him why wouldn’t they just arrest him and give him a process? I’m not buying it.
"Trad-wives" are the pick me girls' final form. I think it's also for women who want to do OnlyFans type work, but don't want to be as risqué. It's like soft core incel porn more than an actual depiction or celebration of maternity.
Windows, Android, & Apple software used to nag you about installing updates endlessly. They don't do that so much anymore. I think it's because instead of alerts asking us to install updates, they now create network outages, software crashes, and other minor issues that require a restart. How often do you have some inexplicable problem, restart your device to fix it, and your machine is like "Hey while we're in there we're also installing this update we just downloaded a moment ago."
Oh, another one: anti-vaccination was pushed by health insurance companies to dampen public perception of government-run healthcare.
Vaccine development and implementation fucking worked. If people were happy with the results, they might end up swayed towards publicly-funded healthcare. So... put a lid on that by whipping up a bunch of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Some folks will no longer see the vaccination programs as successful efforts to protect public health, but as a conspiracy to... do something. And instead of pointing to it as an example of a public healthcare program, you've first got to spend time defending evidence-based medicine, which takes up so much fucking time and energy, and ultimately won't convince people who bored too deeply into that alternate-reality tunnel.
It turned a public health initiative into a fucking tar pit, and now the once-free vaccinations cost over a hundred bucks if you don't have insurance.
the stargate movie/show is "plausible deniability" soft disclosure of the real thing. they "hang a lantern" on this fact with the wormhole xtreme gag in the show.
You know how some people believe Paul McCartney is dead and was replaced with a body double? I think that happened to Jontron at some point before the incident.
Anti-perspirant causes breast cancer. You look at data for Japan back in the 90's-2000s and breast cancer was like 80 times less prevalent in Japan vs the US. Now Japanese are starting to use it more and breast cancer instances are raising to be more on-par with the US. The NIH did a study that was inconclusive so everyone assumes its not true. However, if you read the study you realize exactly how inconclusive it is, and that the answer was truly more along the lines of: "We don't know".
The RTO push is designed to keep the commercial real-estate market from crashing. I've never seen any good proof of this, but believe it. I don't exactly know why CEOs of big companies would really care that much about commercial real-estate. Perhaps their large shareholders (hedge fund managers?) also own commercial real-estate and are putting pressure on CEOs? Perhaps at that level it's just a big club, and all the wealthy just help eachother out, out of solidarity? Dunno.
I think there are secret grades of retail products and stores get these differently graded products based on the "tier" of store they are. So Dollar General candy maybe didn't pass QA to be sold at, say, Harris Teeter. I'm not talking about selling a package with less candy in it. I mean, for example, that the candy at the Dollar General may inexplicably have a higher percentage of adulterants or slightly off on flavor so it gets assigned C grade so it goes into packages of candy sold at C grade markets.
It's probably not a conspiracy so much as I don't know what industry jargon to search for to find out more information.